Greg Perrin - Wall Street Meets Web3: How Sphinx Is Revolutionising Financial Exchange Infrastructure

Full transcript: Greg Perrin on London Real

3:34 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Greg Perrin, the engineer, technologist and blockchain experts. You are the Co founder and CEO of Sphinx, A next generation trading platform built on the blockchain that provides 24/7 access to global energy and commodity markets. Sphinx is making trading faster, easier and more accessible, eliminating delays and high costs to create a seamless, secure experience anytime, anywhere. You believe that decentralized technologies have the power to reshape global markets and have said that bringing traditional assets on chain is the next trillion dollar opportunity. You’ve said that if we want to see mass adoption, blockchain should be like the plumbing in your home, essential but unseen. Ultimately, you believe that 2025 will be the year decentralization stops being a buzzword and starts eating the world.

4:27 Brian Rose: Greg, welcome to London Real in Dubai.

4:29 Greg Perrin: And Brian, thank you so much for having me. So grateful to be here and I’ve been looking forward to this.

4:34 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s going to be great. I want to start by saying that Sphinx is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures, the world’s first media powered investment firm, where our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting edge Web 3 and AI companies while giving our partners marketing exposure across the London in real media platforms and academies. We heighten awareness, create customers and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network. Greg, super excited to be part of this journey with you. So let’s jump in What is Sphinx?

5:03 Greg Perrin: So Sphinx is an effort to democratize access to the commodities trading world and the derivatives that power it. You know, commodities in particular are an asset class that are produced and consumed 24/7, right? These markets do not stop, They do not stutter all the way from the production at the oil pump to the consumption at the gas pump. These assets, you know, they never stop moving and they deserve a market that also never stops moving. At the end of the day, the traditional exchanges that have ultimately LED us to this point in history are built on traditional banking rails.

5:45 And the reality is those banking rails are evolving with the evolution and, you know, technology that blockchain is kind of bringing to the forefront now. So, you know, we’re witnessing such a shift in the way that banking is done. And blockchain has been such a, you know, it’s provided so many opportunities to so many people across the world, right? It’s really banking the unbanked. It’s providing, you know, lending opportunities and opportunities for entrepreneurs across the world, right? And you know, we in the Western world, especially as an American, right, like we take that for granted. We really do.

6:25 And you know, the ability for folks across the Geo, you know, not only the geographical spectrum, but the geopolitical spectrum to be able to access those kinds of banking rails has ultimately created a paradigm shift. And markets are now attaching to that shift, right? Securities, treasuries, bonds, you know, even even traditional crypto assets, meme coins and commodities are simply another asset class that we believe is poised to, you know, be be revolutionized and disrupted by these new banking rails.

7:05 You know, the reality is so, you know, so many markets across the world are monopolized. You know, commodities are one of those markets. And to be quite frank, the consumer is paying the price for that.

7:17 Brian Rose: It’s interesting you say monopolized because people would say, well, no, these are on exchanges and they’re publicly traded, whatever that means. And we can see the price every day on Bloomberg or we can, you know, read it in the paper old school way. But you’re saying there’s a lot of control in this centralized?

7:36 Greg Perrin: Power, yes and, and a lot of that control is paid for, right it’s lobbied for and you know as markets evolve and mature, some of that control is warranted.

7:45 But we have gotten to the point in the evolution of these markets in particular where that is now harming the consumer and the powers that be, the powers that control these assets and control the exchanges that trade them have no, you know, they have no incentive to effectively evolve, right. So the time for disruption is now and we’re really excited to be at the. Forefront of that, nice.

8:09 Brian Rose: So it’s interesting if we look at crypto markets, it’s something that I would argue maybe pretty much everyone in the world has access to all sorts of different exchanges and ways to trade their crypto, whether on a centralized exchange or a decentralized exchange.

8:25 If I look at stocks, whereas 20 years ago this might not have been the same, but now we see things like Robin Hood, we see these low cost brokerage houses and OK, you might not get the the high frequency trading access, but you also I think have some access. But when it comes to commodities futures, we are talking even further down that spectrum of the public or individuals getting access to true liquid markets. Is that a rough idea?

8:51 Greg Perrin: Yes, and you absolutely hit the nail on the head.

8:54 And when you actually step back and view the forest above the trees, it’s insane. It’s insanity because energy agriculture, like these are the most traded markets in the world. They power your everyday life, whether you realize it or not. And they’re so critically important, you know, to, I guess the, you know, the world evolution of health and happiness and ultimately bringing, you know, life and prosperity to the globe, which, you know, I, I view is holistically important.

9:24 And I hope everybody who’s watching does. But at the end of the day, we need to ensure that these assets can be accessed in a democratic way and in a way that is free and doesn’t impede on progress, right? And, and so much of the current system does impede on progress, right? There isn’t as much of A free flow from an economics perspective as there should be. And that’s a real problem, right?

9:53 Especially for such critical things like energy, right? It’s, it’s crazy when you really step back and think about the fact that you know there is a noose around, you know, the, the control and the flow and the trade of these assets.

10:07 Brian Rose: Right, because it’s the big institutions that get access to these liquid markets and the individuals and the smaller players that don’t, and it’s not traded 24/7.

10:17 Greg Perrin: Yeah, exactly right. You know, the, the, this idea of, you know, be being able to speculate, being able to hedge, simply being able to trade across borders and boundaries.

10:28 You know, it’s become more and more important in physical markets, right? Cargo markets, trade markets, like anything that kind of transcends that import export barrier. Why are we so far behind on the basics? You know, it’s, it’s, it’s actually, you know it, it’s disturbing and it’s really, you know, the mission and the reason of why Sphinx exists.

10:47 Brian Rose: It’s a great question and it’s one of the reasons we were excited to be a part of your journey and as investors and, and everything we’re doing for you, because we didn’t see many of these come on on our table. You know, in blockchain, everyone’s doing all sorts of different things.

11:02 But I told the team, I remember a couple weeks ago, I said, look, I said, we’re not going to see another energy derivatives, blockchain based exchange in this bull market. So let’s do this because this is something we don’t have in our portfolio and it’s something that needs to be done by a bunch of guys who know what they’re doing. And it’s really refreshing to see it. And again, I don’t see a lot of people coming from it. I want to get into your background later because that will explain to everybody why you chose this problem.

11:28 It’s kind of scratching your own itch. But you mentioned putting things on the blockchain and I thought of BlackRock. BlackRock and Franklin Templeton have their own systems and they’re putting treasuries on the blockchain and they’re trying to really get some of these banking assets on the blockchain. When you are trying to build a blockchain based, you know, derivatives and commodities exchange, do you consider that an RWA play or a real world asset play?

11:50 Or is it not necessarily?

11:52 Greg Perrin: So blockchain and the finance world in general have this funny habit of trying to confuse the consumer by calling a nascent or new asset class something that already exists or something that it’s not, right, like RW as right real world assets. Like I guess the, you know, the first and foremost you consider a treasury a real world asset or is that something that’s been artificially invented by a government to fund their growth, right.

12:20 So already you kind of have this confusion between like, OK, like what is real in the real world? But you know, we we take at least internally when we started to consider, you know, bringing these RW as on chain or is it that’s what the industry is calling them now. And I’ll put this in air quotes for the moment, but when we started to consider putting RW as on chain, you know, we kind of developed a thesis around tokenization when it comes to the existence of them in terms of their lifetime, right? Like assets that are ephemeral or, you know, have effectively a short shelf life, especially for buoyant and liquid markets, these are very, very difficult to tokenize at scale, right? When I start to consider a barrel of oil or a bushel of wheat to effectively tokenize, you know, 1,000,000 or 10 million or even $50 million, like I can do that, right? That’s not necessarily what I would consider difficult. You find the right players, you know, you find the right ways to verify and then all of the sudden you can cryptographically secure these assets on chain.

13:27 But the problem, you know, really is that these markets are so, so big compared to the crypto markets, right? Crypto right now in terms of it’s, you know, real market cap is about 3 trillion on the notional is is much higher when you start to consider all the derivatives, but you know the notional value of energy, it’s $130 trillion market. Like you start to think about tokenizing that and you go start talking to the shells, the conocos, the BPS of the world and all of a sudden you realize that, hey, even if we could tokenize this, what is the point if that barrel of oil is going to be pumped out of the ground and then consumed in a short period of time? And the same goes for agriculturals. What’s really fit for tokenization are long, you know, kind of like long tail assets, right? The Treasuries, the bonds, the real estate, things that have this longer shelf life, they’re so ripe for tokenization. And that’s really what the industry has focused on up until this point, right?

14:20 The black rocks of the world are tokenizing money market funds, treasuries, bonds, all the things that you previously mentioned. But you know, the short tail assets and the short tail commodities, like they have effectively been ignored because no one has thought through the mechanics of what tokenization looks like. And even when we were starting Sphinx, we, we did go talk to Shell, we went and talked to BP, we went and talked to all these major players. And we really came to the thesis that you can bring something on chain without tokenizing it.

14:49 You can bring a, you know, very transparent, clear trade execution, clearing and settlement mechanism when it comes to the trade life cycle of some of these assets without having to necessarily tokenize them. And we think that so many projects, especially that are dealing with commodities have taken a misstep in this because again, you know, and investors have been short sighted in this as well in the sense that, you know, again, to to, to create a small market with these tokenized assets that are short tail. It’s, that’s not a, you know, it’s not necessarily a trivial problem, but when you start to consider the actual size that you would need to power a global marketplace for something like, you know, spotter derivatives, it’s, you know, it’s, we believe it’s a 0 sum game.

15:38 Brian Rose: OK. I like that. Because sometimes in this space you get people that are tokenizing just for the sake of tokenizing and put it on the blockchain. Just say they put it on the blockchain and there’s no point in it, right? They’re just riding maybe the latest buzzword.

15:50 Yes, but it actually doesn’t make practical sense.

15:53 Greg Perrin: No, it doesn’t. And, you know, the finance industry that we are trying to disrupt, like, you know, there’s a lot of things that, you know, they, that they’ve gotten wrong in the evolution of their business. But one thing that they did get right is, you know, creating digital representations of physical assets. Like that’s, you know, it, it’s something that, again, people are attaching to because it is the, you know, flavor of the week. OK.

16:18 Brian Rose: And they’ve done that really well because you have a futures contract with a ticker symbol and commodities markets have done that effectively. Bankings have done has done that effectively in the past.

16:29 Greg Perrin: Yes. And you know, like our our goal is to be able, you know, there’s there’s a couple of things you need to be able to build a new market within an exchange itself, right. And I talk about the market as in like, let’s say I want to create a market for lithium or another energy adjacent asset, for instance, that might power an EV battery or you know, you know, be again be used in what you would consider broadband energy production 123510 years into the future.

16:54 The the reality is you need, of course, a stable method for discovering price and then you need liquidity. And like, if you can get the recipe for those two things correct, you can create any market in the world that you know effectively is physical and you want to transcend across that digital boundary.

17:11 Brian Rose: OK, now can you tokenize a perpetual future, something that is going to be alive forever? And does that make sense?

17:17 Greg Perrin: You, you, you can, but you have to ask yourself, why would you, right, Because the futures contracts, like when I’m, when I purchase a futures contract on the CME, for instance, right, Like the majority of the volume is done monthly, right? Like you have to ask yourself, why would I tokenize something that’s only going to exist for a month and then it’s going to roll over to the next month, right? And then, you know, the micro futures that exist weekly or even the, you know, three month futures, if you, if you have an asset that’s gonna exist three months, you have to ask yourself, is it worth tokenizing? And can I create enough or can I get enough legitimate players to the table that would verify that asset as legitimate, right. And that’s where you have to stop and ask yourself, wait a minute, what are we trying to do here? Like we’re trying to create a a tradable market, like the verification of of, you know, these assets is rooted in people’s belief in it, which comes from the liquidity. And then it’s rooted in the

18:14 Price, which also, you know, that that’s effectively determined by the community. That’s determined by the market. It’s not determined by by Shell or by Exxon. And that’s, that’s really, you know, when we step back and realize that that’s where that was kind of an aha moment for us. We were like, wait a second.

18:30 Again, you, you kind of got a, you know, especially the investment community is going to try to pigeonhole you into doing something. Your, your, you know, community that you’re listening to for product feedback is going to try to pigeonhole you into doing something. But this, this is the correct way forward. We’re we’re 100% sure of it. OK.

18:47 Brian Rose: And so I know you’re talking to all sorts of partners right now and talking to maybe some regulators. What do you think This looks like a year from now if you get it right.

19:00 Greg Perrin: So we’re very pleased that not just in the United States, but across the world, we’re experiencing a shift towards regulatory clarity when it comes to things like stable coins and exchanges. You know, one, one year from now, we would very much hope that, you know, we are and become an institution that is recognized and that mid and especially larger entities that span the trading spectrum. And this includes, you know, quant firms, prop shops, big banks like that, you know, that class of investor trust us, right?

19:39 And, and you know, anybody can, can, can go create a market. But again, you know, ultimately crypto right now is, you know, playing with Monopoly money when we need to be going to Caesar’s Palace and, and, and playing with the big boys, right? And that’s really what I hope to see as the evolution not only in the next year, but the next 5. And, you know, regulation, it takes time. Getting governments on board takes time. You know, we’ve really been so.

20:05 Brian Rose: How do you get out of a rat?

20:11 Greg Perrin: We, we’ve been so pleased with what we’ve been seeing. And you know, the F, you know, the FCA in particular, right, which is the Financial Conduct Authority out of London. We brought this product to them about 15 months ago, at the beginning of last year. And they laughed us out of the room. They were like, no fucking way.

21:21 We’re not, we’re not, we’re not touching this you, you know, and then.

21:25 Brian Rose: Blockchain, they didn’t like blockchain and or crypto.

21:28 Greg Perrin: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then again, it’s like not even that they didn’t like it, but I don’t think they understood it. And some of that, you know, the the community drives the regulator’s attention, right. Like all of a sudden you had this this shift where again the the black rocks of the world were bringing in RW as on chain, which, you know, forced them to take a closer look. But then, you know, the FCA, even with no influence from us or from any of our partners, came back to us and said, hey, we think we can regulate this.

21:59 We want you to come be part of the Innovation Pathways program, which is effectively a digital sandbox as well as a direct access point to regulators to help push products like ours through the keyhole of regulation to influence mass adoption. Right? And there are so many organizations in the world that use that as a, you know, kind of use that as a flag in the sand to even justify access, right? I can’t go to the Goldman Sachs of the world without that. So, you know, we were, you know, we want to continue to be on the forefront of those conversations. We want to help shape policy.

22:37 And at the end of the day, you know, everybody in crypto is scared, you know, at least the what I would consider, you know, the consumer community, right? Like they’re, they’re frightened of regulators and, and rightfully so, right with, you know, Ulta, especially with the previous administration, all the wells notices that were handed down and, you know, all of the issues with Coinbase and Uniswap and all of, you know, these ultimately wonderful companies that are pushing the envelope to be regulated the way they have and, and relegated the way they have. The, the community was, was, you know, fearful. But, you know, it is a matter of education. Again, we’re, we’re seeing this like very historic deregulation, not just in the US, but across, I think global markets right now.

23:19 And again, you know, our, our focus is on ensuring that we can bring this industry into, you know, the next century in a way that’s not only responsible for the institutions, but responsible for the consumers too, right? Because consumer protections are important, right? We’ve seen so many instances across, you know, across history from, you know, the advent of Dodd Frank to, to, to the, you know, collapse of companies like Enron that really, really harmed consumers. So it’s not, it’s not like the regulators are wrong in their in their fear and in their approach. But you know, they do, they do take massaging to understand what we are ultimately bringing as benefit. And that’s something that, you know, again, we’re, we’re so focused on as an organization, right? And I do think it’s something that sets us apart.

24:12 Brian Rose: OK, so the FCA is coming around and asking you questions and inviting you to be part of their Sam digital sandbox, which is super cool.

24:21 In the US, you mentioned since the new administration, we’ve seen lawsuits dropped against Coinbase, against Gemini. Uniswap just got dropped. OK, nice. Uniswap, Robin Hood and few others I think, which is really encouraging. How are you?

24:34 Brian Rose: How are you finding the regulation in the US at this point? I know it’s still early, but when? What do you think it might go?

24:42 Greg Perrin: You know, I when I started my journey in crypto, which was, you know, you know, back in 2015 where it like again, was this very pirate like industry and then it it became almost taboo, right to work in it, especially as AUS persons, right. If you’re getting debanked yeah. And if I go, if I go tell, you know, my my traditional finance friends that I work in crypto, they’re like, you know, like I don’t I don’t want to necessarily associate with you 2.

25:09 Then all of the sudden it evolving to, you know, this place where it’s becoming more widely accepted. I couldn’t be more excited about that, right? Like as AUS persons, like I, you know, I love doing global business. I love global people. I’m, I’m very much a globalist. But at the end of the day, I want to be able to bring that technology home.

25:29 I want to be able to go home and, you know, hang out with my family, my parents, my friends. And to even have the opportunity to be able to do business in the US is so exciting to me. And I do think that, you know, the SEC and the CFTC are starting to, you know, come around and some of that is is due to the new, you know, political administration in the executive branch. But, you know, some of that is also just the force of the consumer. You know, the consumer is so important.

25:58 And, you know, thank, thank God that we live, you know, in a, in a society where that voice is, is heard and understood and, you know, really helped shape a lot of policy. I mean, I think all, I think it was all of the pro crypto candidates got elected, at least that’s what, you know, Stanford crypto and these are the lobbying groups said. And I think the Stanford crypto and some of those other groups really showed how powerful they are. And I think people are scared of them, but in DC and and I like that. Stand with crypto it’s, it’s a, it’s a beautiful organization and they, they, their tactics were, were excellent, right? So stand with Crypto was, excuse me, they were sponsoring watch parties for all of the debates.

26:35 And what they would do is they would give out if you agreed to host a watch party, they would give you a $50.00 gift card for pizza for California Pizza Kitchen or Domino’s or whatever. And so, so all of the people across the US were having these like huge watch parties to, you know, especially the, you know, the, the pro crypto folks who knew what stand with crypto was, which was I, you know, I’m sure Coinbase was probably one of the main funders, but man, they, they got very creative with how they attracted the public’s attention and they did such a great job with it. Again, I, I, I, I hosted the watch parties, right? I don’t even, I don’t even care about the pizza. I was just like, hey, guys, let’s all come like actually learn about this and listen, listen to it. And, you know, I don’t even, you know, I live, I live in Denver, right?

27:15 But I don’t, I don’t live in a New York or a, a Chicago or one of these main financial hubs. And, you know, I do go there quite often, But, you know, even being able to educate, you know, my friends, my neighbors, the folks that are I guess, in my very close orbit on a day-to-day basis was, you know, it was very encouraging.

27:33 Brian Rose: I had the woman that orange pill, Donald Trump here in that chair about two weeks ago. My name is Tracy Oyos Lopez, and she was one of the people along with the guy that runs a Bitcoin conference that got him to Nashville and got Trump the check for $25 million, which was the biggest industry check he received.

27:51 At least she’s pretty sure about that. And she was just talking about the process. And then they ran the crypto ball in DC and, and again, really told people that, hey, this is important. And if you don’t vote for crypto, then we know that and we’re going to lobby against you. And, you know, she was pretty resolute when it came to the results they had. And she said it was amazing to see who showed up to that crypto ball because there’s a lot of parties happening and a lot of congressmen and senators came there. And she’s like, yeah, time for you to kiss the ring. That’s what she said.

28:24 And I was like, OK, I understand how you feel because if you’re in the US the last few years, I mean, like you said, you’ve been doing this for almost 10 years. It’s frustrating that something you’re so passionate about, the UC is an instrument of freedom, which the US is the one country in the world that should idolize being demonized and also the SEC prosecuting and persecuting people. It’s it must be a nice feeling to see that it’s kind of finally being acknowledged.

28:49 Greg Perrin: Yeah, it’s such a, it’s such a breath of fresh air. And, you know, we have now family and friends in, in, you know, my orbit, my partner’s orbit that, you know, also own a big chunk of Sphinx and and again, you know, like these, this is like real people’s livelihoods you’re playing with right. And it’s real people’s freedoms. And it can’t, it can’t be overstated that, you know, the US needs to become a leader to bring that innovation back there, right? You know, so much of the innovation in this industry has gone, gone overseas and gone abroad. So much of the talent has gone overseas and got abroad. And like, again, as a globalist, I think that’s partially a good thing.

29:28 But, you know, the the US has, you know, it’s fallen behind in so many ways. And this is just another, you know, check, check in that column that’s, you know, kind of lead to undesirable outcomes 5/10/15 years into the future.

29:42 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s like the single biggest evolution of technology in human history or in the last 200 years that the US didn’t dominate.

29:50 Greg Perrin: You know, it’s pretty much true. And it’s such a missed opportunity.

29:54 Brian Rose: You might argue as one of the greatest inventions of all time, You could say it’s more important than the wheel and fire. It’s how humans provide value to each other and yet the US missed it or is in the process of missing it. So it’s great to see it coming around. I want to get back to what Sphinx looks like in one year. If I had to drill down and see what are you guys actually doing, what would I see?

30:14 Brian Rose: Would I see billions of contracts being traded on certain energy derivatives on certain futures contracts? What would it actually look at like from, say, a consumer perspective or an energy producer’s perspective? What do you think it looks like?

30:29 Greg Perrin: So, you know, I, I, I do want to take a second and talk about energy as a whole, right? Like, you know, so much of our team and so much of my origins come from the energy industry, right?

30:41 So we chose strategically that as an asset class, not only because of our connections and our, our deep understanding, but also because, you know, energy producers are, you know, they’re, they’re some of the first pioneers and some of the first Cowboys, right? When you look at how the oil industry evolved in the US, right? Like the, you know, the folks that were out, you know, drilling, they have an attitude about them that leads and I don’t want to say incentivizes, but it you know, innovation is in their in their blood, right? It, you know, I would not argue the same for farmers, right? Farmers like it’s a little bit of a slower industry. It’s in our opinion it would have been much harder to penetrate.

31:28 So we decided to focus on energy in a big way. And, you know, the, the reality is the world’s transitioning away from from oil and natural gas, right as the clean energy revolution continues to gain steam. And that, you know, not only includes the markets, but you know, the infrastructure and you know, everything, everything from, you know, EV batteries to hydrogen cars to, you know, the solar and wind industries. You know, our goal is to as as an exchange, ensure that these assets are tradable and are tradable in a way that, you know, they really weren’t before, right. Again, you know, the, the entire market system has been built on this, you know, kind of this five day a week, nine to five outlook.

32:18 And the reality is the the energy doesn’t move like that physically, right. So, so our goal is to look at the physical side of energy and really fuse the derivatives market and the physical markets into a single global marketplace. And if I had to look a year out, right, you know, like we are focused on oil and natural gas first because they are the dominant, you know, the dominant assets in terms of volume and in terms of adoption. But you know, solar winds and then energy adjacent rare earth minerals, again, you know, lithium, cobalt, all these things that go into producing EV batteries, hydrogen.

32:54 We want to be able to create stable, buoyant liquid markets for these and allow folks to access them across the globe in a 24/7 environment. That’s it’s, it’s so critical for our evolution and the evolution of these markets. And you know, we once we have stability when it comes to energy trading, that’s when we will move to agriculture, that’s when we will move to precious metals, that’s when we will move to other commodities. But you know, as a, as a start up, you have to stay focused, right?

33:27 We can’t conquer every mountain at at once. And you know, we’ve really decided to to focus on energy as an asset class.

33:34 Brian Rose: So I was just having flashbacks to the movie There Will Be Blood, You know, which is about a guy drilling for oil. And then I had also thoughts to the recent series Land Man, which is West TX and all the craziness that goes on there. I guess you got some Cowboys there. But I’m assuming in that industry if you don’t innovate you?

33:54 Greg Perrin: Die yes and it’s like it’s all about tech it is and then you know like the the oil the oil industry is a it’s a it’s a boom and bust industry on the physical side right, you know we during you know during my time in the oil fields you know we were actually using stranded natural gas to mine Bitcoin. That’s how I actually got into understanding the, the energy industry at all. And you really start to see, you know, through that, that lens or that magnifying glass that, you know, the ability to compete. And it is a very competitive industry is, is built on new technological advances, right?

34:35 So, you know, these, these guys are very keen when it comes to the adoption of, of products like ours. And at the end of the day, we think that, you know, we think this is such a, a, a critical piece that’s going to just propel the industry forward in it in such a huge way, right? I mean, I’m not talking about a 1X or A2X gain. I’m talking about 100 X efficiency gain, right, 100 X decrease in trading cost and, and 100 X, you know, more, more efficiency when it comes to how these things are, you know, being traded between people. And that’s, you know, I, I believe as a, you know, as a startup founder, and I’ve been an entrepreneur for almost my entire career, right?

35:17 I, I didn’t, you know, take necessarily a traditional career path out of school. And it’s, it is that, that, that efficiency gain, right? Like the, you know, the ability to be able to disrupt at that, that 100X level is, is so critical to, you know, startups success or, you know, potentially failure.

35:38 Brian Rose: Yeah, 100 X is huge. And I guess the blockchain has a big part to play in that.

35:43 They always said in tech you need something 10X better to replace, you know, the incumbent. It’s probably about right. You know, in a in addition to the trading, you’ve got all sorts of other things that you’re building and then the blockchain can help you do better, including order book matching, transaction execution, clearing, settlement trade, knitting, cross asset margining, client onboarding. And again, I remember when I was trading on Wall Street, you know, I would call down to the Merck and place all my orders. And at the end of the day, I had to check all those trades. I had to go to my back office and they had to clear it. And these guys were making like, you know, 4 bucks a contract and just the clearing.

36:19 There’s all the stuff that happens behind the scenes that the consumer doesn’t really know about that it’s super important. And there’s a ton of, you know, rent being charged on those things. And so I think one of the things that Sphinx is going to do is drop all those costs significantly and speed up those processes and even make them better, right?

36:39 Greg Perrin: Yeah. You know, we want to disintermediate and provide as much transparency and direct access to these markets as possible. When you go trade on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or, or the Intercontinental Exchange, or, you know, even as you go out into the East, you know, the Guangzhou Commodities Exchange, the Shanghai Futures Exchange, they’re, they’re all set up the same way and they all suffer from the same inefficiencies, right?

37:04 So being able to, to disintermediate to, to be able to remove, you know, this layer of inefficiency and, and a lot of that is provided by advance and blockchain that’s really going to provide benefit that’s ultimately passed on to the consumer, right? The reality is, right, even for oil right now on the CME, if you’re a non member on the CME and you have to be a member to trade directly, the cost is $1.50 a contract and they’re trading 6,000,000 of these contracts per day. And that’s just for one grade of oil. So, you know, like, like they’re running one of the most efficient rackets in the world.

37:43 Brian Rose: That’s we can tell.

37:44 Greg Perrin: And there’s no competition. They have no incentive to, you know, to evolve on behalf of the consumer. And that’s really where we saw not only the the problems, but also the opportunity. It’s, it’s very, you know, at the, at the time that we were trading these things, we were so disheartened by not only the, the ability to access and you know, so much of our team came from trading crypto. And then we started to look at this and we’re like, you know, and as we started to do customer discovery with traditional energy traders and hire, you know, folks from that industry into our team, we were like, man, this is we were dumbfounded, right?

38:24 We were flabbergasted by the realities of, of trading these things, right? And there’s so much that goes goes into it and it can be simplified so, so much. And that’s again, that’s ultimately benefit that we as, as you know, a company that wants to operate responsibly, we want to pass that benefit on to the consumer, right? Like that saving should be with the consumer so they can redeploy capital more efficiently. And so ultimately, you know, the markets can become more liquid, more fluid. So, so much capital is locked up right now where it shouldn’t be. And that’s something that we, you know, we really need to change.

39:02 Brian Rose: It’s his narrative of you here constantly in blockchain is decentralization versus centralization. And we complain about the banks who kind of have captive customers. We complain about big tech who have these captive customers and you know, it’s interesting because block chain can I never thought about it going after the centralized exchanges. You know, we think about these other places for information, but that’s ultimately what that is. And then you go back to that innovator’s dilemma. I mean, why would they innovate when their entire business model is based on that?

39:33 You know, and they always say, what’s the other thing? Try to, it’s very difficult to convince a man that what he’s doing is wrong if that’s where he gets his paycheck, you know? And so you got these things working together. And I know these institutions, they’re literally institutions, you know, they are the place to go. It’s the only shop in town and it’s been around for 100 years and it’s gotten really big the last 20-30, forty years and it’s it’s hard to go up against that. Do you find this whole David Goliath thing? If somebody from the CME is watching us, are they going to think I want to get get, not have Greg be successful?

40:21 London Real promo: Well he exited and got a 2300 X return. The wealthy invest in early stage companies folks. The public markets are for suckers. It’s a rigged game.

40:32 By the way, this happens in crypto as well as it’s called pre sale tokens. This is Solana. Does anybody know this chain? They sold pre sale tokens for four cents and you can see the date on there, April 5th, 2018. Look at Solana today folks. That thing’s up over 1000 X the media and Wall Street and all these hype people get you to buy the top. Meanwhile they put their clients in at the bottom and they use you for liquidity to make their clients rich. You can play this same game, you just have to have the financial education and the deal flow.

41:04 Greg Perrin: That’s it. You know, we want to position ourselves, especially in the early days of this to be an alternative and adjacent marketplace, not necessarily a direct competitor, right? Like the, you know, the, the CME is an institution and we want the CME to exist. We actually want the CME to exist because that provides the, you know, the, the, you know, the differences in price and in volume and in product from our exchange to theirs provides arbitrage opportunities for traders, right?

41:36 And so much of that value can be captured and that actually makes markets more efficient, right? Like that the, the ability to discover prices across multiple exchanges makes markets more efficient. And it’s so critical to market operations. And you see it very fluidly in crypto, right? If you have Bitcoin on exchange A trading at 90,000 and Bitcoin on exchange B trading at 85,000, like those markets equalize, right?

41:59 And market participants that have access to both markets can actually earn very serious yield by trading across those exchanges, right? So it’s good. It’s very good for the traders that, you know, we have multiple marketplaces and again, by offering a venue that is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that allows traders that traditionally trade on the CME to come offload risk offload, you know, basis risk, asymmetric risk, whatever their, their risk is in that moment or, you know, through their their eyes. We need to ensure that.

42:36 And, and again, like, I think it’s, it’s, it comes down to market responsibility to ensure that there’s the ability to be able to kind of reduce that risk at the end of the day, right? And you know, you on the CME now, right? When, when, when, when an exchange closes and you see this in the securities exchanges like the, the NASDAQ or the NYSE. And then you also see it on the commodity side, right? The exchange closes now the pipe that takes orders on that exchange continues to to to take on orders, but nobody knows what the price is right. So you have all of these traders submitting, submitting, submitting and they think they they may have, you know, A1 way or another on which, which direction the the assets going to move.

43:20 But at the end of the day, the inability to understand the price from the market’s perspective causes, you know, huge gaps up and gaps down in the market. You know, when you’re staring at the trading screen and you see that big jump in the candle from Friday to Monday like that, that inefficiency is represented there. And it’s our. And again, like, I think, you know, blockchain provides this promise to help eliminate that. And it’s, you know, especially for something that’s so critical to humans survival, like energy, right?

43:51 Brian Rose: Again, we got kids doing this with meme coins right now. Why the hell can we not do it with energy? It’s bloody crazy. Yeah, I’ve had this guy, Anthony Pompliano on my show. And we know Pomp.

44:01 Greg Perrin: Yeah, he’s huge.

44:02 Brian Rose: And he always tweets out on the Sunday when there’s like a big news event in the world. Of course, Bitcoin’s reacting and he’s always like tweeting out. Like the bankers right now, just like their blood is boiling ’cause they have to wait 24 hours to trade on this information.

44:16 Greg Perrin: Yeah, it is ridiculous. And it’s, yeah, Bitcoin, thank God. Like, you know, Bitcoin’s become a proxy for the global markets. When?

44:23 Brian Rose: When? It’s the only liquid instrument, right? And it has become a great proxy.

44:26 Greg Perrin: Yeah, but, but it’s also, it’s, it’s not the right proxy sometimes. So it’s like.

44:30 Brian Rose: It’s the best they have.

44:31 Greg Perrin: It’s not, it’s not. It’s like. Bad news. They sell Bitcoin and it’s like, that’s not really what you want to sell. You might want to sell the S&P, you might want to sell some other things.

44:38 Brian Rose: So yeah, it’s it’s a long time coming that this stuff needs to be 24/7.

44:42 Greg Perrin: Yeah. And we’re very excited to, you know, be be able to provide that so much of so much of crypto, not only from you, you know, the, you know, the innovative perspective, but also, you know, from the investment perspective is focused on just doing the same thing over and over again, right? Like focused on creating the new L1 or L2 or focused on creating the next liquidity pool for the, for, for whatever the flavor of the day in terms of a blockchain is, right?

45:10 You know, and, and so many of these things are great, but they don’t necessarily solve real, real world problems, right? It’s just retail’s money moving from 1 ecosystem to next and propping up one ecosystem to the next, right? And you see ecosystems rise and fall. Some are in the process of rising in this particular cycle and some are in the process of dying in this particular cycle, right. But you have to ask yourself as a retail investor, and even as an institutional investor, like, am I investing in hype or am I investing in something that’s going to solve a real world problem 20 years into the future, right? And, you know, that’s, you know, I, I think the crypto industry in general is incredibly short sighted when it comes to the, the way that, you know, investment moves through it. And that’s something that it’s getting better. But you know, and, and again, I think it’s like this, you know, you see it with, you see it with the traditional hype cycle. We’re seeing it with AI right now where, you know, things get hyped, they go into this like through of almost disillusionment and then they reach real world productivity. And I think crypto is somewhere between, you know, the, the disillusionment and the real productivity. And you know, again, like we, we’re excited and you know, we, my me and my partners and other folks within the company, right? Like we’re not only trying to and, and hopefully achieving, you know, being on the forefront

46:34 Of, of this, this peak productivity when it comes to what the promise of the technology is, but we’re also trying to help others, right? You know, sit on advisory, help develop technologies for other companies. You know, we internally like we take a very, we take a very open stance towards, you know, our employees having their hands in other pots, right? Because when we all work together and when we all, you know, collaborate for the greater good of the industry, that’s when the magic happens.

47:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, most definitely. I want to drill down a little bit into the DNA of your company because I love to invest in people that know their market like in and out and ideally they’re eating their own dog food and scratching their own itch. I always get suspicious when the founders decides that now it’s time to do an AI agent company and you’re like, why? It’s just it’s not in your DNA. And so you mentioned, you know, earlier that you were running Bitcoin mines with, I don’t know, correct me if I’m wrong, excess natural gas. And maybe just talk about your experience there and your partners that brought you obviously to what you’re doing today?

47:38 Greg Perrin: Yeah, so, you know, I’m a an electrical and computer engineer by by education and my time before I entered the energy industry was actually spent developing software for, you know, distributed computing applications, robotics across, you know, mainly the industrial sector. Right before I got into crypto, I was a, you know, a software engineer to firm called left hand Robotics, which which had a, you know, we built large scale robots for fielding, farming and picking using a lot of the same technologies that that a Tesla uses right to to become autonomous. And that, you know, that that company fortunately had an exit that that allowed me to really start to explore, explore other avenues that I was passionate about.

48:21 And like, from the moment I read the Bitcoin white paper, you know, I was, I was instantly like, I’m going to do this the rest of my life. And this, you know, I was a young man at the time, or at least relatively how old I am now. And, you know, we, you know, I had an opportunity through through a friend to help build, you know, some large scale Bitcoin mines and bring Bitcoin onto the balance sheet for some of the largest energy companies in the world, right? You know, type X was building, you know, this, this energy infrastructure for capturing stranded natural gas. And that’s how the company started. And I was, I was brought in as a, as a partner because I knew the compute side, right?

49:03 I didn’t have a ton of familiar familiarity with the energy side, but you know, I was the guy who was out standing on the oil rigs in the middle of these oil fields, like building huge, huge Bitcoin mines, right? We deployed over 200 megawatts for Conoco Phillips, EOG, Devon Energy enter plus, like, you know, large publicly traded companies where you know, even to be out on that site, you know, you have to, you know, have certain certifications and you really got to have your head on a swivel because it’s incredibly dangerous. It’s incredibly. Like land, man.

49:32 Yeah, straight up land Man does such a good job by the way, of like educating about what the reality of being in the oil patch is actually like they do what they do a great job of it. I actually, you know, when I, I don’t watch a lot of TV and I especially don’t watch a lot of drama, but I did watch that show because I was like, man, they really did a good job at actually, you know, showing, you know, the, the viewer what it’s like. They did a good job of it.

49:55 Brian Rose: And what did you see? Like what are the things you see that it’s dangerous, that it’s about risk taking. It’s kind of cowboy. It’s like, what does it show you that of the reality?

50:05 Greg Perrin: Yeah, like, you know, like it’s, it’s like everything from the way the industry operates to the dynamic between the roughnecks and, you know, the corporate side to the way that they portray the boom and bust cycle.

50:16 You, you know, when they, when they talk about how, how the, you know, the drilling operations are financed to the dangers that you actually see on site. And some of the accidents that you see on site. We saw, I’ve, I’ve saw some of the craziest accidents while I was up there where you’re just like, dude, you know, like you see sites blow up. We saw a huge site that had a data center on it. I won’t name the company that was operating it, but it burned for two straight weeks.

50:42 We would drive by it every day because we were out building our own data field and or excuse me, our own data center. And you know, in this field it was just on fire every day on fire. And you know, this is like $100 million worth of equipment, $100 million worth of equipment. You can’t stop it because gas is flowing into. Yeah, yeah, they can’t stop it. It’s it’s like the way they portrayed in that show is really, really, they did a great job with it creatively. And I’m a huge Billy Pop for Thornton fan, so I, you know, yeah, it, it was, it was.

51:08 Brian Rose: Good. I really enjoyed it ’cause it’s weird, Even though I don’t know that industry as a human, sometimes you know, if something’s true and it’s like this feels true, yeah. I was I was impressed again, like most, most of the time, like I don’t know, I shouldn’t say most of the time, but a lot of times, you know, a movie or television show producers, you know, view into a world they’re not familiar with distorts things. And it did not. In that case, I thought they did a tremendous. Job And so you were that guy that was out on the rigs and you went all in and learned the energy industry on the back of having to put mines into these.

51:42 Places.

51:42 Greg Perrin: Yeah, we had to because, you know, we were, we were actually like going into wells that were being drilled. Like, you know, we were a part of the drilling operations. We were a part of a lot of workovers that were happening on existing wells. We were building all of the piping and plumbing infrastructure to get gas from one side to the other.

51:57 Like, yeah, you really started to learn a lot about it. And as the company developed our applications, moved downstream in the production pipeline. So, you know, we started upstream at the wellhead where we were, you know, capturing this gas that was being flared off into the atmosphere and used it to produce Bitcoin, right? That allowed us to capture carbon credits and, and really do good for the environment while, you know, producing Bitcoin and then putting that Bitcoin out of the balance sheet of whoever the operator was, right? We we took our cut.

52:24 But you know, the the the well operator and, and these these energy companies have really started to take an interest in Bitcoin as an asset class and they realized that, you know, it is a asset that is pegged to energy in effectively an end to energy production. But.

52:37 Brian Rose: Interesting. Bitcoin is, you’re saying? Yeah, most people wouldn’t say that.

52:41 Brian Rose: Oh yeah, I wouldn’t even know that.

52:43 Greg Perrin: Yeah, I mean, you know, like the the the, the proof of work algorithm is inherently tied to the price of energy.

52:50 Brian Rose: Well, Michael Saylor calls it digital energy.

52:53 Greg Perrin: It is, and it’s like it’s the perfect, you know, it’s a perfect analogy and and metaphor for what it represents. And it’s also the reason it’s the master asset.

53:02 Brian Rose: And these crazy West TX Cowboys got that,

53:04 Greg Perrin: Yeah, they get innovation, some of them. Did You Know? They get money, Yeah. Oh, yeah. And you know, they they started to see it, right.

53:11 And you know, the interesting thing about the oil patches, you also have a lot of what I would call on grid energy infrastructure that surrounds it, right, to power these sites. Like you have these huge substations, you know, large scale power stations, hydro dams, like there’s so many other ways to create power besides oil, but so many of these companies are involved in the, you know, the creation of power outside of just pumping, pumping oil and gas. So, you know, they, they saw it coming and you know, the, you know, the, the, the real innovators that were bringing, you know, Bitcoin mining to the oil and gas industry.

53:48 We’re also working with on grid power, you know, and that’s, that’s where our business developed as well, right? We moved downstream to, you know, large collection stations that, that were ultimately acting as, you know, central gathering facilities for gas. And that’s how we started to grow much larger, but we also started to build large scale on grid applications, right. So we kind of, we, we tried as a company to, to span really to span the production spectrum when it comes to energy, right? Because you know, we, we want to produce Bitcoin as as cleanly and as responsibly as possible.

54:28 But that, you know, that even that even really was, I guess our viewpoint when it comes to just energy production, right? Like you want to produce energy as cleanly as possible. It’s not just Bitcoin. We, we started to become obsessed with energy and that’s, you know, at, at the time we were hedging some of our risk when it came to producing Bitcoin by trading these natural gas futures contracts, right. So we had certain installations where we were responsible for purchasing the gas to power the mine.

54:58 It wasn’t, you know, sometimes the producer would would take on that risk, but sometimes as a company, especially as we grew, we were taking on that risk and just saying like, hey, we want to we want to a purchase contract for X amount of gas. We will use that gas to produce Bitcoin. And you know, we knew that we could get, you know using that gas. We had to hover between 3:00 and 4:00 cents per kWh from, you know, from fuel to generation, right? Like that was the sweet spot for producing Bitcoin. So.

55:27 Brian Rose: Otherwise you can’t produce the Bitcoin. Otherwise it’s uneconomical. So you want to buy that future contract, lock your price, and even if there’s a spike in price, that way you can keep producing Bitcoin and keep paying the rent and do all the things to run the company.

55:39 Greg Perrin: Correct. And, you know, at the time, you know, like the the geopolitical tensions with Russia were boiling over in Ukraine, like gas started to spike, like we started to have all these like wild fluctuations and the economics of our business and. And you can’t get the futures in a cheap enough way or a liquid enough way.

55:54 It was just like, you know, coming from trading crypto, we were just like, you know, as I started, you know, we, we obviously started to liaise with serious, serious traders from that industry. I started personally developing some of the trading strategies myself and in conjunction, you know, with certain certain brokerages and and large scale trading houses. And as I started to look more closely at the industry, I’m like, what the hell is going on? This is crazy like, why is it costing me six and seven figures to get set up to trade on the CME?

56:24 Why can’t I trade directly on the exchange? Why can’t I arbitrage my price across 2345 exchanges? Like I can’t encrypt. All right, and I’ve been trading crypto for a while. You know, I was buying Etherium at $3. I wasn’t necessarily the first into crypto, but you know, my my investments of crypto have afforded me a lot of opportunities in my life that, you know, a lot of people don’t have.

56:41 So I was already a fanboy, but you know, when I, when I started to look at the drastic differences between the energy trading industry or the, the broadband commodities trading industry and what we see in crypto, I was like, man, this is, this is really screwed up. Like, you know, I, I already had a, a pretty deep understanding of, of smart contract programming. I’ve been playing around with that as a tech technology and I’d be playing around with with building my own blockchain. These these are things that I was kind of just like doing a side projects at the time, just out of, you know, sheer curiosity.

57:13 But you know, we started to ask me and, you know, Austin Durgey, who was also a part of that operation from the marketing side of the time, we started having conversations about like what if we brought this on chain? Like what if we brought this trading activity on chain? What would that look like? Could we do it first? Would the industry accept it? And you know, is there is there a business there? Right.

57:35 And that’s really what led to the the advent of Sphinx and, you know, Bitcoin mining. It’s very, very necessary. But but you know, we call it dummy iron in the industry because, you know, you, you plug it, you plug it in and you forget it. It’s not necessarily something that that’s going to require a a lot of software development after the fact right now. And then there are there are software developers that are working on, you know, more effective pools and merge mining and other really cool advents.

58:02 But you know, at the time we, me and Austin took a look at this and that’s when I decided to sell my stake out of out of Type X back to the founder and kind of go all in on Sphinx.

58:12 Brian Rose: OK. Because there’s not a lot of potential innovation in Bitcoin mining it.

58:16 Greg Perrin: Was a waste of my talent.

58:17 Brian Rose: Right, that gives you upside.

58:19 Greg Perrin: It was just a waste of my probably.

58:20 Brian Rose: More innovation in oil drilling and fracking and all these other things right than there isn’t Bitcoin mining.

58:25 Greg Perrin: There is, but you know, at the time, like we just we just saw this. This is the opportunity we started to get obsessed with it, right? It was just like, it became this freaking obsession where we were like. That’s the best.

58:34 What, what is wrong with this? And like, you know, so you know, it’s, it’s such a, it’s such an opportunity. It’s such an opportunity. And you know, at this point it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of who and when. And we want to be The Who and when, right?

58:48 We want the win to be now and we want to be The Who.

58:51 Brian Rose: That’s how great businesses are started when you can’t not create them.

58:54 Greg Perrin: Yeah, there was no, there was no choice, and there hasn’t been any choice since.

58:58 Brian Rose: Yeah, I remember it was a guest. I had my show named Gary Vee and he said, entrepreneurs, it’s not like we make a choice.

59:04 It’s like we can’t not create this thing. We have to do it. And that’s how, you know, if you’re an entrepreneur, you know, it’s not like you’re necessarily looking for an idea or you have nothing better to do. It’s like I have to make this thing happen because it’s so necessary and I’m obsessed with it and I want to see it become real.

59:21 Greg Perrin: Yeah, it has. It has to come to life and we, we believe like, you know, so many people who are, you know, come from the, the traditional energy trading or derivatives trading industry, right? Like they have horse blinders on, right? They wouldn’t see the solution the same way that that we do. Definitely not.

59:37 Brian Rose: And they would have no crypto blockchain experience. So they would never probably even to think because you got this one asset on the chain, which is Bitcoin and Ethereum, whatever. And then you’re using the energy to get it and you’re like, wait a second, this makes no sense. Whereas if I’m some, you know, trader in New York, I’m not going to probably even know much about blockchain and I probably would have never thought to put these things on blockchain because I’m being compensated some other way.

1:00:00 Greg Perrin: Yeah. And you’re, you’re, you know, as, as if you live that life, you’re indoctrinated into the status quo. Like you, you’re again, you have these, these horse blinders on where you, your field of view is not as wide as somebody who has fresh eyes.

1:01:06 Brian Rose: It was funny when I started on Wall Street, it was like September 93 and I got sat down and they explained to me what the US Treasury yield curve was and how the Fed could adjust short rates. This is before they could adjust long rates and everything they did would just determine everything. And I wasn’t taught this at Business School, by the way. I wasn’t taught this at Sloan, MIT, and I just accepted it as true. I never said what’s the Fed?

1:01:35 Is the Fed even part of the government? I never asked these questions. And you just like you said, you get indoctrinated. This is the way the world is. It is and then wasn’t until 20 years later and maybe when I started learning about Bitcoin, that I started asking questions about why and how and what is money and why is it this and these kinds of things. But when you’re in that world, you play by the rules. And then when you’re being well compensated for those rules, you have no reason to ever question it. Yeah, precisely.

1:02:01 Greg Perrin: And you know, we’ve been focused on ensuring that our our team is well-rounded, right? Because we need, we need players from both sides, right? Matt Williams, who is the ex director of market structure at the CME is now on our team. And he’s really been instrumental in helping ensure that we are coloring inside the lines in a way that especially, you know, the, the, the mid size and larger institutions will accept. You got to make sure you’re doing everything correctly so they can play on your exchange.

1:02:34 Brian Rose: I like that. Let’s talk about this year because I’m guessing you’re going to be issuing a token. That’s a big move. And then I’m also curious how that plays in the whole ecosystem and just what the plans are for that. Yeah.

1:02:48 Greg Perrin: And it’s, you know, this is where the company gets really exciting, right? This is something we’re so, so excited about, right? Because, you know, I’ll step back and talk a little bit about our infrastructure. You know, we decided to build our own layer one blockchain because we did not feel that any of the existing systems would be acceptable to both regulators and to the institutions that we want to bring in to come trade on our exchange, right. So initially it started to look a little bit like a DYDX where we have our own chain. We are our own exchange that sits on top of this chain. You know, we we did use Tenderman as a consensus engine. Now we have made some alterations to that consensus engine to allow for more parallelism as well as asynchronous transaction processing, which is really, really exciting.

1:03:36 And we, you know, we need to be able to control the infrastructure from the regulator’s perspective, right? Like the right, you know, when it comes to the, when it, when it comes to these assets, classes that have that have already, again, you know, experienced some degree of regulation. You know, the powers, the powers that be when it comes to the regulatory bodies, they need to know who’s where the data is being stored, who’s storing it. Being able to ensure that we have some degree of control of this is, is really important, right.

1:04:05 So we’re not necessarily truly decentralized. We are a permissioned chain. And we believe for, you know, to bring this, this next trillion dollars of assets in into these types of ecosystems, it’s so critical to understand that there’s a trade off between, you know, decentralization and ultimately what is seen as speed that that’s a trade off that nobody gets away from. And, and ultimately it’s a it, you know, when you when you look at distributed computing as a whole, it becomes a physics problem, right?

1:04:33 And we see this right now with Visa, MasterCard, with maybe the Merck, with banks, they can do these large amounts of high speed transactions. Tremendously fast. And like, you know, the fastest blockchain in the world is processing blocks in, you know, 400 milliseconds, 300 milliseconds. The, you know, the New York Stock Exchange and the CME they process trades in nanoseconds, right? So to compete with that, like we had to make a decision about speed versus decentralization.

1:04:58 So we are, we are, you know, quasi centralized as an organization right now. We take all of the best aspects from the decentralized world and we stay true to a decentralized ethos. But when it comes to the way that we run our network, if we really want to go compete with the big boys, there’s there’s no choice right until there is a very serious leap in quantum networking, which is coming. But, but that’s 50 years away. That’s 50 years away at least.

1:05:27 But, but yeah, you know, kind of kind of back to, to the, you know, the token and, and, and how it kind of powers our ecosystem. You know our from from the from the blockchain’s point of view, which which I’m going to talk about the exchange and I’m going to talk about the blockchain separately, but from the blockchain’s point of view, you know the the token is meant to act as a security mechanism. It is a proof of stake network, but that network is also being designed to house other high speed financial applications, right. As we started to develop the infrastructure, we found and we created something that was form fit and picture perfect for, for training commodities at a very high rate of speed, right, especially their derivatives where you know to, to bring this to another L1 ecosystem like we, we would just would have had to suffer too many, too many setbacks and too many hits to performance and, and to speed.

1:06:22 But we have now created something general enough where I want to see the next NASDAQ built on this infrastructure. I want to see the next NYSE for trading securities, bonds, treasuries, other, you know, other assets and we are encouraging builders of those types of products to come build on top of us, right, which is really, really exciting. If we can become the ecosystem and the infrastructure for traditional finance, that’s, you know, that’s the dream, that’s the goal. And and again, it’s, it’s almost evolved to something bigger right now what we’re calling the GCC X, the global commodities exchange is our keystone application. We as a company will never develop another application outside of that right like that’s for other builders to do. We will maintain the chain and we will build, you know, this commodity derivatives exchange and this physical commodities exchange.

1:07:10 But again, we are we’re already in the process of talking with other, other builders for a number of really exciting traditional assets. And I can’t mention too much about these yet, but please keep an eye out because it’s absolutely stocks. Bonds. It’s gonna blow, it’s gonna blow this thing out of the water. It’s gonna be really exciting. Now, when it comes to the commodities exchange and the way that we’ve, we’ve created a feedback loop from the tokens perspective, you know, the, the validators obviously are being paid out in our token, transaction fees are being paid out in our token, but we don’t require users to to hold it right.

1:07:42 We, you know, all transaction fees are paid out of the trade. So you don’t, you know, it’s not like you’re running out of gas to trade or, you know, when you’re in a, you know, a tight situation when it comes to your trading window and your ability to execute for the sake of the gain. We, we want to create as fluid of an experience as possible from the UI perspective. But we have created this feedback mechanism whereby as volume increases, the token price will increase. And that is, you know, that’s critically important not only to the users, but also to, you know, the potential investors and and speculators on on this token. We are still working on exactly when the launch will be. We are not trying to time the market. I’m not sitting here looking at my watch like, oh, I think this is the best time to launch because here’s where Bitcoin’s going to be.

1:08:25 Like we’re focused on creating a good business that has good fundamentals, right? The token price will do what it is supposed to. If we accomplish our core goal of creating a very effective business that turns, you know, that effectively turns, you know, consumer need into ultimately into, you know, money, money for the business and for the ecosystem. So you know, that’s very much our focus. We we do believe the launch will be sometime in the next six months.

1:08:54 I don’t want to say exactly when yet, but we’re very excited about it. We have, you know, the absolute tier one partners already lined up to market make for us. Amber Group is one of them. You know, we’re, we’re so excited to have them as a liquidity provider and you know, it’s, it’s going to go off with a bang, man. We, we have a number of, you know, really exciting partners that we’re going to start to announce that are that are helping not only with, you know, with some incoming private sales, but also with, with marketing in the launch, right.

1:09:27 Brian Rose: And these are the the best names in crypto. Amazing. And the volume will directly be shown in the price of the token. That’s the idea is that the more your volume you’re going to do, the more desire there will be for that token because they’ll have to validate more transactions. Yeah.

1:09:42 Greg Perrin: And it comes, it kind of comes down to like the velocity of money and and then like ultimately scarcity with within the market itself, right. But you know we do have this exponentially decaying curve for initial rewards that are going to go out to validators that will effectively Dr. the price up. And we’ve been working with Shane Mulladore over at Forged Forge is an incredible company, but you know, they’ve really helped us perfect a lot of our tokenomics and ensure you know, and they, they’ve done, you know, they did, they did Pudgy Penguins launch.

1:10:10 They’ve done a number of really, really successful launches. They’re they’re, you know, they’re consulting firm. And if you, if you’re a creator of a block chain product and you’re looking for a piece of software to help with tokenomics, I highly suggest you check out Forged. It’s free. You can talk to Shane if you want and you know, he has, he’s got it like, you know, a world class team. But I can’t say enough about how much that product has really helped us ensure that we have a successful launch when it comes to the token.

1:10:36 Brian Rose: So important. It’s so important. I’ve seen great ideas with great founders with great moats and great IP tanked because of a bad launch and bad tokenomics. And I’ve seen guys that are really well versed in everything about starting a company who don’t know a damn thing about a token. And then this, in this world, in this sector, that can kill you. And so it’s very important.

1:10:59 Greg Perrin: Yeah. We’re really excited to have Republic as a partner as well. So they’ve they’ve been helping tremendously with with the tokenomics and they’re also validating our chain for us. Validation Cloud is another one that’s really acting as a tier one validator for our chain already in Test Net. If you know if you’re interested in in validating on testnet, please reach out to me.

1:11:19 Brian Rose: Yeah, definitely. What would you say is your biggest challenge for the next year besides TGE? What would you say is the thing that’s top of mind?

1:11:29 Greg Perrin: What it’s, you know, there’s, there’s a few things right? And, and again, like some of it is like such a delicate balancing act to ensure this thing just absolutely goes off at launch. But what we are most focused on as an organization right now is liquidity, right?

1:11:46 You know what is going to attract Tier 1 traders is Tier 1 liquidity. And you know we’re we’re partnering with, you know, some of the best liquidity providers in the game when it comes to energy and when it comes to energy trading to help ensure that that liquidity is there from day one. And really it comes down to incentives, right? If you look at the way that ICE started or the CME started, right, like they created the right incentive programs for market makers and you know, market making, when you, when you step back and think about what market making is, you know, this, this ability to provide tight bid ask spreads and ensure that no matter what the dynamic in the moment of the market is that these trades are being executed in an efficient way from, from the, from the liquidity perspective. Like that’s so, so important, right? If you can find the right recipe that ensures that you know the the sky is the limit no matter what the asset class is and you know crypto, crypto market making versus market making in in commodities is a very 2 very different things. Whole different set of players, whole different set of companies that ultimately dominate those spaces. There is some overlap and, and, and kind of bleed between certain organizations, for instance, DRW and Cumberland, right?

1:13:02 Cumberland is a, is a, you know, a partner of ours and you know, DRW we’re hoping we’ll be as well when it comes to the liquidity side for market making on our exchange. But you know, the reality is they’re, they’re two separate industries. And again, ensuring that we have both traditional mechanisms as well as new creative mechanisms for, for these, you know, for these liquidity provisions as well as the providers that we need to incentivize is ultimately, I think the the most critical challenge to get right.

1:13:32 We are, we are also offering, you know, in in line with what we have seen in crypto, right? We are also building our own liquidity pool that we have market making software that will, that will ultimately act as a, as a buffer and ensure that, you know, trading is orderly and you know, we, we don’t get these, you know, these, these cascades when large orders are placed.

1:13:56 Brian Rose: I’d love to just quickly talk about market making because, you know, I teach at crypto and D5 Academy and then the third week I get them all to do a liquidity pool trade and I try to explain what market making is.

1:14:10 And for the average person, it’s quite a challenging concept to get your head that it even exists. I use the used car dealer analogy. The guy you go in to buy a used car and he’s got to have cars and cash because you might want to buy your car or you might want to buy, you might want to sell your car, you might want to buy a car. And so he’s got to have these two different things on hand and be able to be able to switch between one and the other. He’s also going to look at you when you come on the lot and he’s probably going to fade his price one way or the other. And so, you know, I grew up, you know, trading on markets in Chicago.

1:14:39 I’ve been down on the exchange. I’ve been to the Board of trade that had been back in the day, been to the American back in the day where there are these big ex football players in Chicago that were £300 that would literally push each other around a pit to try to get everyone’s attention and make the most markets. But then crypto came along and you got these crazy rocket science kids, which maybe you qualify, that created this concept of, you know, automated market, market market makers and these liquidity pools where you could take the job of a local edit exchange and now allow anybody to provide that liquidity. And I’m just curious from your perspective, because you’ve seen both sides, what are the pros and cons of both? Or do you sometimes explain it to both because people don’t know, you know, used to pay, you still pay a lot of money to get maybe a seat or when it was physical on the board or the Merck and you had the privilege of making markets and being in there.

1:15:29 But you also have the responsibility to make markets to a certain extent. And then now you’ve got a lot of these software systems doing it and access to other people. So what would you say? The main differences? And and and? You think you need both, right?

1:15:42 Greg Perrin: Well, so we need like we have a liquidity pool, but ultimately Sphinx operates a central limit order book, right? Like central limit order books. That is one thing that we believe that the finance industry got right now. AM Ms. are great when you have low liquidity, like when there’s a low liquidity environment and you can’t influence or incentivize market makers enough to come in and participate.

1:16:02 Then all of a sudden, if you have this AMM that that’s trading on a curve effectively, which is how most of them work these days, that’s very, very effective and operating a, you know, a high speed, high throughput central limit order book is, you know, there, there’s a lift there technologically, right? And it’s a significant lift. You know, the, the, the reality is our liquidity pool is, you know, and, and the market making software that we’ve developed internally and that we also give to, you know, our potential market making partners as, as baseline software.

1:16:34 And again, this is delta neutral software. It doesn’t take us, it doesn’t achieve to take a side one way or another. And it’s, you know, we have to be very careful about how we develop this because the regulators keep a very, very close eye on an exchange and a market maker if they’re being developed under the same roof, right? And, and two, and that’s a good thing, right? Because you can imagine if I create an exchange and then I’m trading on my own exchange, like what if I develop a piece of software that gets access to information first or, or for whatever reason is, you know, taking a DD positive strategy at the expense of our customers.

1:17:05 So, you know, we, we created and again, all of this is open source, so anybody can go look at it, right? We do not, we do not especially, you know, some of our software is still closed source, but at launch everything will be open sourced, right? We do not that’s a, it’s a, it’s a big difference between US and the Cmes of the world. And we believe that the CME and ICE are and a number of the market makers are colluding now, which which is again, it’s another problem that we really aim to solve on behalf of the consumer. But you know, Aamms for, for certain activities and certain assets, they’re great and they work great. But you know, we, we do and are from believers and, and you know, having a, a central limit order book, right, which when it comes to high, you know, high throughput trading is more predictable from, you know, the perspective of the market maker and the trader, right?

1:17:54 Anybody who’s trying to take a, a delta positive, you know, or, or employ a delta positive strategy, like they need to know how liquidity is going to cascade, like where it is up the order book as the price changes. And having that predictability, especially when you have, you know, large amounts of capital at stake, can’t be overstated.

1:18:13 Brian Rose: OK, nice. I wonder if we could zoom out a little bit because you’ve been in this market for a long time and I’ve heard you talk maybe when you’re speaking to the youngsters or maybe the newer people about how to kind of deal with market cycles.

1:18:27 And you once said, quote, if you’re feeling to despair and some are feeling that right now, zoom out. The cycle never changes. Build, accumulate, survive. And when the tide turns, you’ll be glad you did. You also said crypto isn’t always hyping moon shot.

1:18:41 Sometimes it’s just endless waiting, watching your back drags drift sideways while you scroll crypto Twitter for scraps of excitement. Patience is part of the grind. And the last one you said, I love this quote. By the way, Greg, if you stay bullish, you don’t have to get bullish. That’s the way I feel about this market. I’m I’m just bullish.

1:19:00 You know, the price of Bitcoin doesn’t change my opinion at all. But maybe you can talk a little bit about these quotes because this sounds more like a really seasoned, you know, traitor to come out with things like that.

1:19:11 Greg Perrin: Yeah. You know, and again, I’ve been, I’ve been speculating and trading a long time. And again, like that activity has afforded me a ton of opportunities. You know, when I first got into crypto, I was in college, you know, and I was, I was still working, you know, as a software engineer.

1:19:25 But you know, when I, when I very, I remember when I really first started to understand what crypto was, I was so excited by it because, you know, I went to school in Boulder, right? Boulder has a very thriving entrepreneurial community, right? There’s a ton of great tech that comes out of there and a ton of great companies that are ultimately born and ultimately incubated there. And at the time, you know, I was I, I again, like, you know, I was working at a car dealership. I finally got my first software job. I had a little bit of disposable income that that job offered to pay for the rest of my school.

1:19:57 And you know, so I was working and going to school, just busy as can be, but. I wanted to invest in some of my friends businesses, right? As in small businesses of, of friends that I knew or people that I had met around the Boulder start up community. And you know, the reality is in the Western world, in most places in the western world, you can’t just go invest in somebody’s business. Like, you know, you have to be an accredited investor, which means like you have to be making a certain amount or have a certain amount of net worth. And it’s a, it’s a high watermark, right? And it’s basically like the government telling you they don’t trust you, but really it’s to keep rich people rich and poor people poor.

1:21:18 That’s the reality. Scandalous. It’s, it’s, it’s, yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s one of the most shameful things in, in the entire world because it’s again, man, it’s, it’s a, it’s a system of control. It is, it is absolutely a system of control designed to keep poor people poor at the end of the day. But you know, ’cause if you have $5000 and you want to take a bet on a company, you can’t, there’s no way to do it.

1:21:38 There’s no legal way that you can actually do that unless you’re being brought in on the friends and family around. And even then, like, you know, the government pulls out the magnifying glass. And some of this is because, you know, lawsuits have have started to to fly when companies go under and there have been scams. But at the end of the day, that’s like that should be the, you know, the responsibility of the investor. It’s not the responsibility of the government to get in the middle of that.

1:22:00 Brian Rose: So at that time like crypto. Been like a true libertarian crypto. Bro

1:22:04 Greg Perrin: yes. Oh, absolutely, man. And you know, the reality is crypto all of the sudden offered a way for the little guy to invest and make a bunch of money.

1:22:13 And and that’s, you know, that’s something that, you know, that’s that’s what really first got me enamoured with it. You know, it was the fact that I had a couple of wins, but it was also the fact that like, wait a minute, it’s not just me that’s having these wins. It’s like it’s the little guy, it’s for the little guy, right? And all of a sudden like that, that totally is, is what made me immediately and fall in love with it. It really is, you know, because I was, I, I could go, I could look at a company’s open source software, I could go look at their investors, I could look at their team, I could call them up and I can be like, boom, I want to invest in this. Like Ethereum for.

1:22:46 Yeah. Oh God, man, no. And so many, so many other smaller tokens that kind of fell out of that, that first wave of, of blockchain program ability that Ethereum ultimately provided was like, that was, that was my first like real again, you know, in your, in your pre interview questions, you talk about aha moments. That was a big aha moment. I was like, wait a second, this is, this is really crazy. But you know, market and, and market cycles right now, like the crypto market cycle is attached to the Bitcoin halving, right?

1:23:11 Like every time the Bitcoin reward halves 12 to 18 months after you see the peak, it’s, it’s like clockwork. It has never failed. It will never fail. Like the reality is Bitcoin is, you know, it is the master asset because not only it was first, but because proof of work as such. I don’t want to call it perfect from an algorithmic perspective, but it’s, it’s so rooted in a physical process of energy production that it’s you know, and, and for whatever reason, like you know, when you create, you know, and it’s just basic economics, right?

1:23:48 When you start to reduce supply and keep the demand steady, the price is going to go up, right? It’s going to go up. So you know that the the Bitcoin, you know, the Bitcoin halving schedule when when Bitcoin halves and all of a sudden there is, you know, almost effectively like a supply shock from the miners side, like that’s going to drive the price up right. So my investment strategies do revolve around that and they always have. But again, like, even if you even even when it comes to that halving cycle, zoom out, man, look at the freaking, you know, look at the chart and realized that we’re still early.

1:24:20 Again, like energy $130 trillion crypto, even notionally when you include all of the derivatives, it’s probably got to be less than $10 trillion. So like we’re, we’re still early. This is still a nascent asset class. And you know, at the end of the day, more and more traditional assets are going to start to be represented on chain and, and again, like the, the, the floodgates have opened. So, you know, I, I very much like, I’m not really one to like day trade.

1:24:49 I don’t, I don’t trade trade. I don’t speculate. I find plays that I believe in and I go all in. That’s, that’s how I operate. I’ve said it’s really, you know how I, I believe the average investor should operate.

1:24:58 Brian Rose: You still holding your Bitcoin?

1:24:59 Greg Perrin: Yeah. Oh, God, yeah. To the moon now again, I got my, I got my whole family in on it, you know, parents, mom, dad, like my dad’s, you know, back in the early days, man, we had a bunch of miners running in my dad’s basement. And that’s how I really first got into it.

1:25:11 Me and my dad were building like, you know, GPU rigs as fast as we could at one point. Like me and him and my brother.

1:25:17 Brian Rose: That’s amazing. So dad has Bitcoin too?

1:25:19 Greg Perrin: Oh yeah.

1:25:20 Brian Rose: So not many dads he’s.

1:25:21 Greg Perrin: Got a he’s got a bunch of crypto yeah, he’s got a he’s got a variety. Austin, Austin, my partner’s dad, man, he’s he’s he’s all in in crypto too, man. Like he comes from a crypto friendly, you know, Austin’s brother is the Austin’s brothers, you know, who was a very, very early participant in Bitcoin. And you know, he’s we, we very much have tried to indoctrinate our families. So my culture, my dad has a master’s from Caltech in electrical engineering.

1:25:45 And on top of that, he’s also just one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. But he’s also over 80. And when when it comes to crypto, it’s very age-related, I think when it comes to people being able to get their head around it, which is why maybe the Warren Buffett’s of the world never will.

1:26:00 Brian Rose: Yeah. And I mean, I know Dan Tapiero really well, runs a multi billion dollar fund called 1 RT. He’s been in the space for a long time. And he said, Brian, I go around the world and he’s like, I can pretty much orange peel anybody I talked to with enough time. But he said it’s the, the sweet spot is right around the 50 something where they’re above that, it becomes exponentially harder.

1:26:21 And when it’s below that, it becomes exponentially easier. I got a 7 year old son who’s got more digital assets than CZ because he plays Roblox and everything. And if you explain to him, he’s like, yeah, duh. But if you explain to my dad, even as smart as he is, he’s like, no, I don’t believe in it.

1:26:35 Greg Perrin: Yeah, and it’s especially if you know, your, your dad sounds like he probably had a successful career. But it’s like, you know, if it’s if it’s been working, why would you change it?

1:26:44 Warren Buffett’s the same way. But Warren Buffett’s investment strategies are timeless. But yeah, he’s, I mean, you know, I’m sure, you know, I’m, I’m sure his kids have probably tried to convince him and a number of people have tried to convince him. And his partner, Charlie Munger, you know, you know, God rest his soul. But like he, he freaking hated crypto man.

1:27:02 He’s in his 90s, you know, by the time it it ended.

1:27:05 Brian Rose: But you think there is a generation issue with this because it’s something that’s really hard for these older people to get their head around because they didn’t grow up with the Internet, let alone digital assets.

1:27:16 Greg Perrin: Oh, absolutely. And that that, you know, that spans a variety of technologies, right? You know, try trying to get my grandmother to use Chat GPTS pissing in the wind.

1:27:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely an issue. Couple more quotes from you.

1:27:29 You said zoom out, build your stack. Whether it’s crypto skills or relationships, the cycles always reward those who stay consistent and don’t lose sight of the long term vision. So yeah, these are pretty good time and tested strategies.

1:27:43 Greg Perrin: Yeah. You know, I’m a very, very firm believer in in, in ultimately the building of relationships and the building of teams, right. Like, you know, as Americans especially, right as you go, as you go into Eastern cultures, there is less focus on the individual and more focus on the whole. That’s just the way that the the culture was built and has evolved over time.

1:28:04 And you know, communist capitalist, like don’t, don’t, don’t even think about that. Just, you know, realize that you know this, this concept of lone wolf. Family. Individual. Yeah. Lone Wolf.

1:28:15 Success and super superstars and this and that, like that’s, that’s a, that’s a very western concept and really, man, it’s, it’s, it’s teams, it’s villages, it’s tribes that you, you know, create real effective change. And, you know, I’m so blessed to have such a great team around me. And that’s, that team has, has been built over, you know, many, many years and through, you know, through, you know, a number of relationships and I, I love, you know, meeting new people in the space. And, you know, I, I do believe that, you know, relationships are the ultimate currency if you want to get into the space or be in the space or become a good trader or, or really start to get alpha, right?

1:28:56 You know, there, there are layers to, to this industry and you know, becoming, quote UN quote, an insider is, it is, it takes years, it takes years and years and years. And like, I’m even on the outside, I’m even, you know, like, if, if you really look at the layers of the onion, right, like you’re never really in the middle. You’re just closer to the middle, right? There is no middle. But like there is this, this metaphor and this concept of, you know, building, building, you know, these strong relationships that’s allowed my businesses to exist over time, right?

1:29:25 And, you know, I can’t say enough to my team. They’re they’re the reason they won’t get me up every day, right? Being able to talk to them. And, you know, ultimately work is work, but work is also fun. And they’re, you know, they’re the fun part.

1:29:40 Brian Rose: Yeah, so important, So important. It’s funny, I I was recently at Satoshi Roundtable and it’s a place where you get a lot of OG crypto people there because they don’t want to be seen at the big conferences. They a lot of times don’t want people to even know who they are. And one of them pulled me aside and said, you know what, Brian, if you want to be successful in crypto, he said it’s not about timing the market, it’s about time in the market. And I thought along about that and I, I would have to agree. And I think what you, it’s, it talks about what you just mentioned.

1:30:12 You know, how long have you been there? Who do you know, who have you talked to? How many cycles have you gone through? How many fads have you seen? And the, and it’s true, the more day and the more time you stack up, the better decisions you’re making and just be aware of that.

1:30:28 And so if you’re new to this market, know that it it’s really about putting in the time and that’s how you can be successful. And it’s less much less about trying to buy low and sell high and get this at this time. Yeah, I just thought it was a powerful statement.

1:30:42 Greg Perrin: Yeah, it is. And, you know, like, you know, you, I think, you know, if you’re serious about being in here, you know, take, take some of those gains and reinvest them in going to conferences, in meeting people, in going to your local meetups. If you’re in a city that has them, if you’re not, start a meet up, like try to get like minded people around you. And, and, you know, use that as a, a springboard because again, the power, you know, the power of the many is always going to be greater than the power of the the fewer of, you know, the single.

1:31:10 You know, even, you know, my, my, my Co founders are at Ethereum Denver right now, which was the first Ethereum conference. And I actually helped, you know, I was a mentor. You know, I’ve been a mentor the last few years when it comes to the hackathon, right? So I go, I go help projects, learn how to how to build. But at the first Ethereum Denver, I was one of the hackers, you know, like I was, I was, you know, and, and that time it was so crazy. It was maybe 500 people in like this, this really dilapidated building.

1:31:37 Everybody stayed up for three straight days. You know, they had like coffee and, you know, they brought in food and then like everyone was just hacking smart contracts on Ethereum, right? It was so, it was so crazy. We had a little team and we like, we, I remember we like built a little payments app, almost like a little Venmo payments app between, between Ethereum users and now it’s 30 or 40,000 people. There’s, you know, there’s like 500 side events. It’s crazy, but yeah, you know, if I, you know, I, you know, so, and again, so much value has been derived for me personally and I know through, through my network from, from going to those types of events.

1:32:14 And you know, you have to see it as an investment not only of time, but of, of money, right? Take, take some of those gains and go take a trip. Like go really find out what the industry’s about if you want to elevate your game.

1:32:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, really good advice. You mentioned the test net was live for anybody listening. How can they start to really kick the tires on what you’re building it Sphinx, whether they want to develop on your layer one in the future, whether they want to use your exchanges to trade energy, energy derivatives and all the cool stuff that’s coming in the future.

1:32:42 What’s the best way to start engaging with you guys and and also staying up to date with your developments?

1:32:48 Greg Perrin: So first and foremost, come join our communities on Telegram, our communities called the Crypt. You know, we’re very Egyptian themed, Egyptian focused. We have a new website coming out that’s like got us like so much nuanced, you know, Egyptian visuals kind of built into and.

1:33:03 Brian Rose: Why the Sphinx?

1:33:04 Greg Perrin: Why Sphinx? The Sphinx is the guardian, right? It’s like it, it’s like this symbol of like safety and security first and foremost. And you know, the Sphinx transcends a number of different cultures. People think of it as purely Egyptian, but like the Sphinx has been seen throughout history and it, the relation that that it has to the I, to its iconography is, is so it’s, it was just like, you know, when I went and visited the Sphinx actually with, with Robert Grant, you know, Robert, Robert Grant was one of my mentors and, you know, turn turns out that, you know, he’s a, he’s a huge Egyptologist and really a great crypto guy.

1:33:39 But you know, I, he, he was nice enough to take me, take me there after I met him actually at Ethereum Denver a few years ago, you know, and like literally 4 weeks after I meet the guy, he flew me out to Egypt with him. You know, he’d rented out the whole Giza Plaza. There was a private tour with like four of us, like wandering through the pyramids and what not. He’s and it really had an impact on me, man. It’s like, you know, like that, that was like, you know, as in a lot of scholars eyes, it’s the cradle of civilization. And you know, what the Sphinx represents ultimately, I thought I thought was like, you know, the perfect representation for a financial company that values safety, safety and security. Amazing.

1:34:15 But yeah, join, you know, you can join, join our Twitter, join our Telegram. If you reach out to me directly on Twitter, I will answer. Sometimes it takes me a day or two, but that’s a great way to get a hold of me. You can also tag, tag me in, in the crypt like me and me and my, my founders are all very, very active and engaging with our community there. We have a great community growing as far as the test net goes, you know, through our website you can go look at the block explorer, you can look at the validators. The exchange is going like a test net version of the exchange is going to be launched in the next 30 to 60 days on the back of the L1.

1:34:49 But the L1 is now in test net. We have, we have some builders building on it, but we have documentation live. We tried to make it as seamless and easy as possible. And we’re looking for contributors, right? If you want to come contribute to documentation, to code, you know, we’re, we are incentivizing those kinds of activities. If you want to contribute to the community, if you want to help build with us in any way, shape or form, we are incentivizing with cash, crypto tokens, equity, Yeah, Come, come build with us, right?

1:35:14 Come build with us.

1:35:15 Brian Rose: Excellent, and the website is Sphinx. SPSPHX dot IO and that token ticker will be SPHX as well. OK, fantastic. Yeah, I love the Egyptian History Week.

1:35:26 Brian Rose: I took my boys to the British Museum, and I mean, they had toothbrushes back then. Like, you see all this stuff they had. And I’m like, these people have way too much time on their hands. You know, they had a ton of wealth and that allowed them to have the time to do all this innovation. And of course, we don’t even know half of what happened perhaps back then.

1:35:43 Greg Perrin: No, you go see it and it’s clear to me, like we don’t know what happened, right?

1:35:47 You go to like the inside of the King’s chamber, in the Queen’s chamber, and it’s like it looks machined. It’s like everything is like the granite is so smooth. You like look at the rock on the outside and you’re like, OK, this is really, really huge. How the hell did they did they build this? Then you get to the inside and it’s even more mind blowing. You’re just like, what is going on here? It’s, it’s like, I think truly one of the, you know, the great mysteries of the world.

1:36:05 Brian Rose: Well, I’ve had Graham Hancock on my show so many times, so he could go deep on how old that really is. So yeah, Greg, I’m going to close with a quote from one of my mentors. And he always used to say to me say, Brian talk is cheap, but it takes money to buy whiskey in West, TX. And I think that was his way of saying that you better have something to back up what you’re what you’re going to do. And for me, it feels like you guys have a ton of that going on and I have to spend a lot of time in West TX. I think, you know, that’s for people that are really discerning, you know, they want to see something that it really produces great value.

1:36:46 And it feels like that’s what you guys are building.

1:36:49 Greg Perrin: Yeah, it’s been like, you know, again, we’re not we’re not another defy exchange. Like we can’t just go like take off the shelf technology or something that’s already been produced like it it is you know, we we are truly creating something new and it has taken a tremendous amount of time, right. Like, you know, when I, when I look at the evolution of, of the company for us to get from zero to one has it, it’s a different lift than I think a lot of crypto companies and also crypto investors are, are used to.

1:37:14 But we have such a great team and a great group of people that, you know, are not only funding us, but but, you know, helping us with connections, helping us build, helping us with technology architecture, helping us with, you know, leadership like they’re so there’s so many great people surrounding this thing. And again, man, I can’t, I can’t thank my team enough because when we do launch, everybody’s going to be blown the hell away. It’s, it’s, it looks incredible.

1:37:40 It works great. It’s going to be really crazy and it’s going to change the world.

1:37:43 Brian Rose: I love it. I love it. Well, I thought I’d run away from derivatives for a long time, but I left Wall Street to become a broadcaster.

1:37:49 Brian Rose: But now you’re dragging me back in full.

1:37:50 Greg Perrin: Circle, you’re back.

1:37:51 Brian Rose: I know, but thanks for that. I’m really excited about this project, really excited to be with you guys along the whole way and take it to the next level, so.

1:37:57 Greg Perrin: Yeah, we really appreciate your support. Thank you so much for having me here too. I can’t tell you how much I.

1:38:01 Appreciate it was a great conversation, man.

1:38:03 Brian Rose: All right, man. Thanks for the future, man. Yeah, to the future. Good stuff, man.

1:38:07 Brian Rose: And I also want to thank Web Three TV. We’ll see you next time on London Meal.